Why would Eddie Sutton, the man with more victories than any other active men’s college basketball coach, choose to end his career this way? Why would the man who has coached in three Final Fours, who has led teams at Arkansas and Kentucky and Oklahoma State, decide to be where he was Monday night?

His legs were crossed. He was sitting on the University of San Francisco bench. He was coaching a team going nowhere, in a game that didn’t mean much, inside a building that was maybe half full, with the inevitable result an 87-55 victory by Santa Clara at the Leavey Center. This gave Sutton, one of only five men with 800 or more major college hoops wins, a record of 3-12 during his time at USF.

College basketball is not an immense deal around here, so a lot of people might not understand that all of this is a little like Frank Sinatra choosing to finish out his career doing a series of Friday afternoon shows at the Santa Cruz boardwalk. A charming notion, but inexplicable. No matter how you try, it’s hard to fathom why a 71-year-old legend in his profession would select this particular denouement for himself.

According to Sutton, he didn’t. He was back home in Oklahoma when word came in December that USF needed a coach to finish out the season after the school coaxed Jessie Evans into a “leave of absence.” Sutton was offered the gig and initially said no.

“But, well, my three sons wanted me to do this,” Sutton said about 90 minutes before Monday night’s tipoff. “They said, ‘Aw, Dad, go out there and you’ll have a good time.’ And I have had a good time, other than the fact that I’m not accustomed to losing. And I thought the talent level would be better than what it is at San Francisco, or I might not have come.”

This was not the first time Sutton has been so blunt. He has repeatedly called the USF roster the least-talented of any team he has coached. And the way he tore into his team during a timeout after Santa Clara took an early 20-point lead Monday, you could tell Sutton’s opinion remains unchanged.

But there’s still something that doesn’t compute: Sutton did not take the USF job with blinders on. While on a business trip to Southern California in December, he had gone to see a game at Long Beach State; he has friends in the athletic department there. Coincidentally, the opponent that night was USF.

“I watched a little over half of the ballgame before I flew back on a redeye,” Sutton recalled. “So I had gotten a glimpse of them . . . but I was just watching the game. And it was a close game. I wasn’t thinking about taking over either team or anything, I was just there as a fan of college basketball.”

Thus, several days later when USF asked, Sutton answered. Some people believe he actually took the job because (a) Sutton needed only two victories to reach the 800-win milestone, and (b) he was seeking a measure of redemption for the way he exited his previous job, at Oklahoma State, after an embarrassing drunken-driving incident.

But to tell you the truth, having talked with him Monday, he is fairly convincing that neither of those reasons drove his decision. Instead, he talks about how he got a kick out of his grandchildren phoning him up after his 800th victory, and of how much he still loves practice, and of how, despite his scorching remarks, his team is maybe sort of perhaps improving. Monday, though, the Dons were definitely living down to Sutton’s assessment.

“What I missed when not coaching was the fellowship with the coaches, bringing along a team,” Sutton said. “I have enjoyed watching the players mature, grow and get better.”

We’ll take his word for it. Yet there is something melancholy about the whole story, what with Sutton living at the Fisherman’s Wharf Holiday Inn for these past several weeks, hobbling on his sore legs up to USF’s hilltop campus for his final lap.

Oh, it’s not all sad. Sutton has learned the delights of In-N-Out burgers (“I’d never heard of them before coming out here, but that’s a good, good cheeseburger”), and there is a long shot that he might get the Dons into gear for a surprising run in the WCC tournament.

But years from now, you have to figure basketball historians are going to look at Sutton’s numbers and wonder about those last dozen or so games in San Francisco, wonder what they were all about. But it could be as simple as this: A man has to know how far his love for a game can stretch. From the way he looked Monday, Sutton is learning the hard way.